Since version 2.5 WordPress introduced the shortcode API, more detail about it in our article „WordPress Shortcode API“. Recently I had a task which is surely common, but with the help of shortcode API and custom fields very easy to solve. I had to include some advertisements (in german: Werbung) into some articles.

In each article the editor puts 3 custom fields: bild (image), link, linktext. In the text he can set the shortcode [ad]. This shortcode will be recognized by WordPress with the help of the following function. It will also load specific data to display the ads here.Continue reading …

WordPress 2.5 extended the tagging function and added many little features. Among others the shortcode API for example, where you can add strings to a content in a fast and easy way. This makes the call from other functions in Plugins or theme functions much more easier.

The possibilities of shortcodes are immense, many other applications love this feature and with the new one you can make it even easier for the users to write in their backend. To put Shortcodes into the quick tag menu, I recommend to use the AddQuicktag Plugin.

It's easy to understand and to use. I will give a short introduction with some results below. Continue reading …

With the upcoming WordPress release version 2.7 the menu changes to the vertical. This offers several features to the author which we already mentioned in some other posts. But this time I explicitly address Plugin authors and ask them to make their Plugins more user friendly in terms of usability. I will show only two tiny features.
Each of them have been discussed several times on the wp-hacker-mailing-list, but nearly everybody considers them as big improvements to usability.Continue reading …

The possibility in WordPress to display all users is not available in a standard installation. To get a simple list of all users, you can use following function. To display just specific user groups or users, there are many template tags available to do so, go to WordPress-Codex - Author Tags.Continue reading …

Some of you know this problem already, you publish a post and while you are publishing you notice an error. That's very annoying, the error is in your feed an published to the whole world.

That happened quite often to me, my fellow readers a writing comments so fast, right after publishing, to tell me about some errors I made, it's unbelievable. So I thought I should create a workaround to have the feed published a little bit later, even 5 minutes can be helpful. Here we go:Continue reading …